Thursday Book Review: “The Seed Thief” by Jaqui L’Ange

The Seed Thief is one of our newest releases from Penguin Random House South Africa (also know as Random House Struik). It’s been getting some amazing reviews, and today we’d like to share a few with you! Keep reading for more information on Jacqui L’Ange’s masterful work of fiction, and to see what readers have been saying about this book. PLUS keep scrolling to the bottom of this article to listen to an interview with author Jacqui L’Ange…

About the Book

When botanist Maddy Bellani is asked to travel to Brazil to collect rare seeds from a plant that could cure cancer, she reluctantly agrees. Securing the seeds would be a coup for the seed bank in Cape Town where she works, but Brazil is the country of her birth and home to her estranged father. Her mission is challenging, despite the help of alluring local plant expert Zé. The plant specimen is elusive, its seeds guarded by a sect wary of outsiders. Maddy must also find her way in a world influenced by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies and the selfish motives of others. Entrancing and richly imagined, The Seed Thief is a modern love story with an ancient history, a tale that moves from flora of Table Mountain to the heart of Afro-Brazilian spiritualism.

Reviews

“Most of us can only dream of becoming the kind of writer Jacqui L’Ange already is, and the stunning The Seed Thief is only her debut novel. Her prose is luminous. It feels as if her words are caressing the pages they are printed on. Enthralled from the beginning, I was reading with bated breath, afraid that the author could not sustain such excellence through an entire novel, that she would take a false step, get lost along the way, and lose me as a reader. But The Seed Thief is one of those rare books which deliver on all fronts and leave you completely satisfied.”
-Karina Magdalena, LitNet

“While a passionate love story and a botanical mystery form the framework of the plot, L’Ange explores a myriad other fascinating themes and threads in this wide-ranging, lush and layered work… The Seed Thief is a richly sensuous experience and L’Ange an alchemist who has mixed an exotic and mesmerising potion.”
-Avis Perks, IOL

“Who knew a tiny star-shaped seed from near-extinct tree could spark so enchanting, suspenseful, and intensely spiritual a tale as Jacqui L’Ange’s debut novel, The Seed Thief? …I lost myself in a story that is lovingly crafted with words that capture the minutiae of the tiniest elements of biology and the larger-than-life culture of South America’s biggest nation. The Seed Thief is a story of worlds beneath worlds within worlds, of surrendering to the splendour of chaos and the beauty of the mysterious.”
-Andrea van Wyk, And the Plot Thickens